John Cow dot Com » Contests

Get a FREE Membership at NicheFiles & SyndicateKahuna

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:00:58 +0000

Yesterday I told you about an excellent free offer that my good friend Marc Quarles has put together that gives you…

Detailed market & keyword research (not just basic research… but very detailed)
Excellent market analysis (shows you exactly how to dominate the market)
High quality PLR content (that is actually REALLY good)
Beautiful and Unique Templates (very high quality)

I also mentioned how every month he is giving away “1 niche pack” to those who sign up at …

This is all cool and everything but I thought…

How can I make this cooler for everyone!

So here is what I convinced Marc to do. Marc is allowing me to give away one lifetime membership (costs $77 per month) to “Niche Files”!

Now that is cool but to make it even better, on top of that I am going to give away a life time membership to my SyndicateKahuna system (costs $47 per month) where you can publish your content to thousands of blogs.

This is a perfect combination of…

Research + Content + Link Building

…and all you have to do to enter for your chance to WIN is…

Go to http://bit.ly/bCCGpp at sign up for the free monthly niche pack.
Review the package that was sent to you and then…
Come back here and comment about our thoughts on what Marc is giving away for free each month.

This contest closes at 12noon EDT (-4000) on Tuesday July 20th and make sure your comment uses the name and email address that you registered with Niche Files (so we can double check that you did sign up for the free offer) and so we can contact you.

NOTE: Please do not post multiple comments, a lot of them will go to moderation, so if you submit your entry and do not see it right away… do not worry… it will be approved before the draw.

The draw will be a random draw and each comment will be giving a number and then a random number will be drawn using the generator at http://www.mathgoodies.com/.

So what are you waiting for… go check out this great free offer now at http://bit.ly/bCCGpp

Can’t Make Money With Your Website – I Think This Might Help!

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:30:47 +0000

First of all Happy New Years… kind of hard to believe it is 2010… for me anyway.

In the spirit of New Years (new beginnings and all that stuff) I wanted to take some time and offer some help to some of you. A couple hours a go I was approving comments on this here blog and I read the following…

So I thought to myself…

“What a great idea for a post!”

The problem however is I am not sure many of you are in the mood for reading much since last night was the number 1 hangover creator of the year. So instead I thought… hey lets do a podcast.

So, if you are one of the many out there that can relate to that comment and have been trying to make money online and seem to be going nowhere… well maybe this 20 minute podcast can help.

This is 100% content… no trying to sell or pre-sell anything.

It is a very one sided podcast… simply because it is me simply talking… but I think it is some pretty good stuff and hopefully it can help a bit.

I do have a request though. As mentioned in the comment, the site Jim is struggling with is…

http://www.ebay.internet-money.org/ebay-rules.php

And I was going to critique it but I would love instead to get some of you, my awesome readers, to give Jim feedback instead. Not looking for huge paragraphs of feedback but instead simply comment below with an answer to the following question…

–> What is the number one thing you recommend Jim modify with this web page to help him get conversions?

I will follow up on the post with my opinions and feedback to your comments but I would love to hear all your opinions first.

OK, so download the podcast (great stuff I think)…

(The free MSN tool I mention in the podcast is
http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/)

…and then check out http://www.ebay.internet-money.org/ebay-rules.php and come back here and answer…

–> What is the number one thing you recommend Jim modify with this web page to help him get conversions?

(here is a little hint of one of my opinions… WAY TOO MANY DISTRACTIONS on the left and Crappy Title… oops that’s two.. but what’s yours… and be a little more specific then I am here.. this is just a hint, I will give details in the next post)

PS – Don’t forget to check ut the latest cool contest here at Johncow –> http://www.johncow.com/happy-new-years-and-some-free-super-cool-prizes-for-you/

A Powerful Comment Spam Killer – A One-Two Punch!

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:51:10 +0000

I was just browsing through my stat logs and looked up at my “Akismet Stats”… to my surprise (why i did not pay attention to this before is beyond me) I noticed that in April my “Comment Spam” dramatically lowered from 15000+ to 5000+ and then the next month less then 100.

Click Here to Enlarge

The reason… that was when i upgraded my WordPress build and enabled the new “Automatically close comments on articles older then 15 days” feature.

Click Here to Enlarge

So…. if you run a WordPress blog and want to dramatically reduce your comment spam and have not already done this, then…

Install the “Akismet” plugin (is most likely already installed because it comes default with any WordPress installation… so just activate it) http://akismet.com/
Follow the directions at http://en.wordpress.com/api-keys/ and get an API key to be able to use the plugin
Go to “Plugins” –> “Akismet Configuration” and enter the API Key
Go to “Settings” –> “Discussion” and check the “Automatically close comments on articles older then [] days” and enter “15″, then save settings.

That’s it… You will start to notice a HUGE decrease in the amount of comment spam you are getting from that point on.

For most of you this was probably nothing new but if it helped let me know

Christmas Contest Winner Announcement!

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:55:24 +0000

Congratulations to David from http://www.dailydollarreport.com, he is the lucky winner of the $200 Christmas Giveaway!

David, I have sent you an email… but if you do not receive it please use our contact form and send me your paypal address so I can send you the cash!

Protect Yourself Before You Start a Contest – Part 6 of An Aud Life dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:05:00 +0000

First of all I have to come right out and say that I am not a legal professional and any advice I give is not to be construed as anything other then my personal opinion.

Holding a contest can be very fun, it can get you good exposure and is a great way to interact with your readers… the problem is you can also get into a lot of trouble if you are not careful.

A lot of people do not realize how much at risk they are when it comes to their online business and if there are certain things that are not already in place, then holding any type of contest or giveaway can add fuel to a potentially HUGE fire.

Before you even consider announcing your contest, you want to make sure that you have a proper…

…and if you do any ecommerce transactions (such as sell sponsor ads), then a…

purchase agreement

Now I realize that some of you might not understand the need for this, after all…

Its Just My Little Blog!

Well I think you would be incredibly surprised to find out what seaming ‘harmless’ and often ‘stupid’ little things have got people into HUGE trouble, simply because they did not have a clear privacy policy or terms of use. The way I look at it is why even play with the chance of this happening, take the time and make sure you protect yourself.

TIP –> I also highly recommend, if you have not already done so, that you incorporate your business. In the USA, the state of Nevada is very affordable to get incorporated in and they do not charge any state income tax. The cool thing is you do not even have to be a resident of the USA to do this in Nevada and the tax benefits PLUS the protection it provides is huge. This however is an entire different series of posts to get into.

A good example of how the documents can protect you is with minors. If you offer products, services or contests and someone under the age of 18 years of age participates this can be a potential legal nightmare, especially if you ask for any personal information. This is why on JohnCow I state very clear in the contest rules and it is stated in the privacy policy that anyone below the age of 18 is not permitted.

URGENT –> If your site targets anyone under the age of 18 you will want to understand very clearly the “Children’s Online Privacy Act (COPA)” and consult with a lawyer.

For any of you nay-sayer’s that think I am full of crap or too worried, all I can say is.. I Do Not Care!

It is your business… it is your blog…. it is your life. If you want to risk running a business and a contest without protecting yourself, its your decision… but I think it would be nuts.

NOTE –> These documents do not give you the right to make up rules that cheat or scam people. They are in place to protect you and your business, not to take advantage of others. I am sure I do not need to mention this but you never know.

Another important point is do not just copy and steal someone else’s documents from their site, for example here on JohnCow our documents are purchased through ‘Internet Law Compliance‘ and they are copyright protected. If you want to get the forms for free then there are free options available and if you type in “free privacy policy template” or “free terms of use template” you will find lots of options. Be careful with these though, if you are getting serious with your business, you will really want to consider doing this right. The nice thing about using ‘Internet Law Compliance‘ is they also have a lot of training material they provide you that is very eye opening.

So now I have a question for you… is your blog or web site protected?

In the next post I am going to cover setting up the rules of the contest and then we should be able to launch it at http://www.anaudlife.com!

Part 1 – Planning Your Promotion Strategy
Part 2 – Understanting the How and Where of Your Promotion Strategy
Part 3 – Planning the Subscriber Traffic Strategy
Part 4 – Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going
Part 5 – Planning the Contest Criteria
Part 6 – Protect Yourself Before You Start a Contest
Part 7 – Rule of the Contest Prize Delivery

Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going – Part 4 of AnAudLife dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:12:12 +0000

In the previous post Planning Our Subscriber Traffic Strategy I talked about planning out our strategy for growing subscribers and today I want to talk about a fantastic method that works very well for not only growing subscribers but also getting lots of buzz and activity going about your blog.

Before I get into this however, I want to bring up an important point that I really want to set straight. Your job with your blog is not about trying to sell things to your visitors and you need to remember that. No one likes being sold to and what you need to do is look at it like a Doctor or Teacher. The good doctors and the good teachers are the ones that truly care about helping other people, they genuinely care about the people they interact with. Yes many of them… well in fact I am sure 99% of them would not be there if it was not for money but the point is they do not look at their patients and students as money. Focus on being a trustworthy resource to your site visitors that truly wants to provide value and they will trust you and come back again and again.

A Contest or Giveaway?

Contests and giveaways are very different from one another, a contest is a competition where a winner will be chosen because they have acheived the best results. Giveaways on the other hand are open to anyone that wants the participate and everyone has an equal chance of winning.

Contests (competitions) are great but I do not recommend them for a blog that is just starting out and the reason is it can limit the amount of people that may participate based on feeling unqualified to participate… but this of course is just my opinion.

What Does Your Audience Want?

I feel like I am beating this to death but this is another reason blogging about something you are passionate about it so much easier. If you do not really understand the market, if you do not understand the needs and wants and desires of the market then it is hard to understand what types of things would be of most interest to them. When having a contest/giveaway on your site you want to offer something that your audience would appreciate and you would be surpirsed to know that money is not the usual #1 choice.

Funny thing about money is that we all want it but it is not as big of an incentive as you would think. Offering $150 in cash will 90% of the time be less effective compared to a physical product of equal value. I am by know means certain as to why but my best guess is getting money is usually put directly to paying a bill or an expense of some sort and getting a prize… well that is different. For example, I would never buy a MacBook Air… yes they are cool and fun but they are just not very functional and practical but I would absolutely love to win one.

So the very first part is to understand what you are going to give away. You will need to come up with the initial prize because for a new blog the chances are you are not going to have people jumping at the opportunity to sponsor your site.

Remember that you look at the investment it is costing for the contest as advertising and you could blast through $100+ pretty darn quick with adwords, sponsored banners and numerous other strategies that would disappear as soon as the money stopped. The cool thing with contests is if you do it right the initial expense will be paid back over and over again for the long term through backlinks and subscribers.

This is why i mentioned in a previous post about understanding your resources available and you will want to be able to budget money towards this. What you need to do is figure out what you can afford and be careful not to stretch yourself thin… do not think that going into debt for a super prize will be much more effective then a less expensive prize.

Target Your Audience!

Over the past few months I have recieved a lot of sponsor requests and what I have found absolutely surprising is the markets some of these sites are in. Having a blog on gardening that is giving away a banner ad on a “make money online” blog is not what I would call ‘Targeting Your Audience’.

I think part of the problem is that people see what appears to be working on JohnCow.com and try to mimic it but fail because they are net stepping back and focusing on providing value to their readers, instead they are focused on marketing. You need to be sure that the prizes you are giving are prizes that your target audience is interested in.

The other reason for this is return on investment. Lets say you have a gardening blog that offers a grandprize of a sponsor ad on Johncow. This may be attractive to some gardeners that run a website but I would guess that 95% of the gardenign market does not own a website or need advertising.

Summary:

1. Decide if you want to do a contest or a giveaway

2. Understand what types of things your audience want (for example with An Aud Life, “Pain Relief” is what the majority of people in this market desire, so our prizes will focus on that).

3. Know how much you can afford to invest.

4. Put together a package that targets your market.

In the next post on this series I am going to talk about how to plan the criteria of your contest/giveaway so that it encourages people to spread the word and also helps promote your blog to various locations. It wil be a couple more posts about the contest side of things and then I will move on to the search engine part of promotions.

So what are your thoughts on this post… got anything to add?

Part 1 – Planning Your Promotion Strategy
Part 2 – Understanting the How and Where of Your Promotion Strategy
Part 3 – Planning the Subscriber Traffic Strategy
Part 4 – Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going
Part 5 – Planning the Contest Criteria
Part 6 – Protect Yourself Before You Start a Contest
Part 7 – Rule of the Contest Prize Delivery

Sunday Ramblings – A Contest and A Lesson from Jerks

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:35:17 +0000

Well today I am taking an opportunity to vent about something that drives me absolutely insane… but before that I want to take an opportunity to let you know about a fantastic “Give Away” that is starting tomorrow and is being 100% sponsored by the guys behind StoreStacker.

You may recognize this as the store I put into the back-end of the GamerzReviewz blog I did for the COWPetition. Well the owner, Scott, came in contact with me a few months ago and asked about holding a contest here at JohnCow and since we were already booked up for contest, I had to wait and schedule it for August. Well when you see the prizes, you will agree with me that this is worth the wait. Scott has put together a fantastic list of prizes and I am going to make this very easy for everyone to get involved.

Here is what Scott is offering…

I will have all the details of the contest posted tomorrow so stay tuned!

I also want to thank http://www.storestacker.com for putting such a fantastic package together for us.

Now it is time for me to do a little venting!!

I have been in this business for a while now and if there is one thing that i absolutely know, it is there are some people who just thrive on being complete and “udder” A-Holes! (Yes I am sure you know what the A stands for there).

Well I am used to this, I have had thousands of customers and out of that you will always get the people that think everyone is out to screw them and take advantage of them. These people tend to never become successful because they are always blaming everyone else for their situation in life.

There are also the other people that just have too much time on their hands and make a point of researching and putting together bullcrap in order to make someone look bad and make themselves feel somehow like a better person.

In the internet marketing world, we have a bad reputation. People that do not understand our business immediately categorize us as spammers and or scammers. One of the wonderful things about owning this blog is it is free to come here and I am free to post and comment as I wish and this is often a great stress relief. Overall however I am pretty good at taking things with a grain of salt, I have come to realize that there are just jerks in this world who will always be out to blame and or hurt others to justify their existence.

What I can not take however and frankly pisses me off to no extent is when someone makes outlandish accusations without any justification at all.

OK, so now you are probably wondering… what the heck are you talking about here?

Well, as you know, I am helping my wife with a blog on Arthritis and the reason she picked this topic is because she has suffered from the condition for over 3 years now and is something she is very passionate about. Well one of the things I mentioned for her to do when she started this was to get involved in a couple forums and the reason is because she really should get involved in the community to understand it. Well over the past month, she has gotten very attached to two particular forums and absolutely loves them. She has been able to share things and learn things and it is a fantastic experience for her… or I should say it was.

Yesterday I saw a link from one of the forums that my wife is involved with and this individual started spouting off that my wife was the worst kind of spammer and scammer and should be put in jail, he started venting about using the forum for the wrong purpose and how she does not belong there. Now, he came to this conclusion not from anything my wife posted about, he could not use those since the 50 some odd posts she has made have all been sincere and heartfelt. Where he came to this conclusion was because he came to this blog and saw me mention forums for traffic and immediately ASSumed that this meant spamming.

The comments he made were completely ridiculous and it was in my opinion the most immature and outlandish reaction i have yet seen… and I honestly thought I have saw it all.

The individual is claiming because I am teaching my wife on how to get traffic that this must somehow mean she is scamming or spamming, which goes back to people not understanding what we do.

BUT then I need to ask myself…

Can You Blame Them???

I have never once condoned or suggested that anyone spam or scam anyone and in fact I say that if you want to build a long term business, doing such a thing is suicide. This however is not what lots of people that are in this business are doing. As I started looking at this, a lot of supporters started coming out in the forum saying that the guy that made the accusations is an idiot and has done this before, which then made my wife and I think… he is not really trying to be an ass (even though he is very good at it) but he is reacting to a situation that from his experience has been very negative.

Now do not get me wrong, I have no patience for these type of ignorant people, that no matter what anyone else says, will always feel that they are right and are advocates of “Guilty until you prove me your innocent”. But what I do understand from this and what we all need to learn from this, is these communities are passionate about their topics and extremely protective. The reason they are protective is because they are constantly having people sign-up for them and do nothing but spam the living crap out of them. This causes for some to be extremely paranoid and it reality many black hatters have given justification to this.

Now, I do not get into the topic of forums and communities for another few days but I want to take this opportunity now to set the record straight. If you are looking for a shortcut to traffic and want to learn how to take “negative advantage” of places like forums, this is not the place to learn. What I am going to teach you is the absolute importance of being open and honest in these communities and how you use them to learn, share and grow. If you goal is to “market” in these forums, you WILL fail.

Forums are only effective if you truly want to become a part of the community and be a resource to others. If your only goal is to make a buck, then do not waste one second of your time with forums.

When I showed Audrey the concept of forums, she had no idea these places even existed to the degree that they do and now she is addicted. She is learning more then ever before and is making friendships and is also feeling that she is helping others.

If you are in a community with nothing but the intention of marketing, then you really need to reevaluate what you are doing. Not everyone in this business is in this to ruin it for others, some of us actually want to offer value and help make places like forums better.

Now for the biggest lesson in all of this: Do not let people stop you from what you are doing. There will always be A-holes like Levlarry, in the world who think that they know you, that everyone is trying to scam them. These are people that do this to justify some inner sense of importance and what you and I need to understand is that there is nothing we can do about these type of people. We can not make them go away, we can not make them stop BUT what we can do is not give them the justification they are looking for. These people will not listen to what you say and you could spend hours wasting your valuable time trying to defend yourself when in fact there is nothing to prove because there is nothing to back up their accusations.

In summary however, I just want to say that “levlarry”, you are in fact an idiot, just like the others in that forum say about you and you are way of line with your retarded claims. bobotheASS (aka bobothegeek), you are simply just an ass (I am addressing bobo from a comment he made on this blog).

Me, this is my blog and so I can say what ever I please and this is what I wanted to talk about

PS – blogging is great therapy

So, you got any opinions on this extremely far too long ramble or about the up and coming giveaway?

How to Promote & Run a Contest – A Case Study of An Aud Life dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 22:00:12 +0000

If you have been a reader of JohnCow for a while now, you will know that we are constantly holding contests here. Contests are fantastic ways to get a good amount of exposure, gain readers and more.

One of the huge advantages of us having a well established blog (along with lots of business contacts) is we have been able to sponsor some pretty sweet contests that have not cost us a single penny. This however does not mean that if you are just starting out and have few (if any) contacts that you can not hold a successful contest. What it does mean however is you are going to have to work a little harder to get some buzz going for it and you may have to spend some of your own money on the prizes.

Over the next week or so I am going to put together a case study for promoting a new blog which includes how to hold a contest and we are going to lay out every step of the process here in a blog series so you can learn first hand how to do it. The blog I am going to use for this is a blog that my beautful wife of 12+ years just created at http://www.anaudlife.com

Since I first got into running a business online, my wife has had 0 interest in any part of it. She did not like computers, had no interest in running a business and had not a clue as to how to describe to others what it was I did. The only part that she had any interest in was spending the money that it generated

As a stay at home mother (raising our two daughters) she has recently started to show an interest in blogging and getting involved with some forums and places like FaceBook and about 2 months ago asked if she could have her own blog. After about 10 minutes of laughing (because I thought she was joking), when I could tell from the look on her face that at that moment she thought I was a jackass… I then said in disbelief…

“Are You Serous?”

Well, she was serious and so immediately it popped into my mind… “What a great opportunity for a case study for my readers!”

So the first thing I had her do was list the top 5 things she was passionate about and loved to research on the internet. Number 2 on her list (after shopping for clothes) was rheumatoid arthritis. You see my wife was diagnosed three years ago at the age of 30 with rheumatoid arthritis and in fact it had gotten so bad that she had to use a cane full time. Once she knew what the cause of the pain was, she immediately began researching and testing treatments and everything else related to this condition. She has since eliminated the need for a cane completely and has become very physically active (our dog cant even keep up with her anymore).

As soon I saw this on her list –> BINGO!

You see, having a niche that you are 100% passionate about is a niche you want to be in. You can write with passion, relate to your readers and best of all it encourages you to learn even more about the topic so you can have stuff to write about.

Over the past 4 weeks Audrey has started to piece together a blog that is pretty darn good and she has done it by herself…

She has wanted to learn how to do it and so alI I have done (other then a little graphics help from some of my office staff) is provided some direction. It is a definite learning curve for her (little things like how to write a title, researching keywords, using forums for ideas and so) but I am very proud of how well she has done so far.

She is now at the stage of starting the promotion for her blog and this is the part that I am going to get a little more involved in and this is also the part that I am going to completely share with all of you. You will see first hand what we are going to do and the first part of this is going to be planning out the promotion strategy and organizing a contest.

So, you are going to want to get your pen and paper ready (you will want to jot down ideas that pop in your head) and get ready for some fun learning. I also recommend, if you have not done so already, that you subscribe to our blog so you can keep up with us… we will also be putting this into an ebook form for all our readers after it is done.

PS – One of my good online buddies is putting together a wicked contest for you all that will be hosted here on JohnCow starting next week, so stay tuned!

So out of curiosity…

[poll id="8"]

Part 1 – Planning Your Promotion Strategy
Part 2 – Understanting the How and Where of Your Promotion Strategy
Part 3 – Planning the Subscriber Traffic Strategy
Part 4 – Planning a Contest to Get the Buzz Going
Part 5 – Planning the Contest Criteria

COWpetition Ends at 12 Noon Eastern Wednesday June 18th

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:39:49 +0000

It is so hard to believe that it has been a month now since the start of this COWpetition and we have to admit that we are a little sad about it. We have fell in love with our COWpetition blog GamerzReviewz and tomorrow it is going up for sale

As for the COWpetition itself, we have had a blast and we hope you have enjoyed the posts. We will be closing the doors to the contest and shutting off the comments on the contest page at 12 noon eastern tomorrow (June 18th) and so if you still want to earn some extra tickets, now is your chance!

Once we close the doors on the contest, we are going to count up all the names and tickets and then we are going to be holding the draw for the prizes.

If you do not have a comment indicating what you have done for the contest, make sure to do that now. Remember all comments with links go into moderation, so do not fear that we did not get the message.

We want to also assure you that even though this contest is over, we still have a LOT of awesome things planned for you at Johncow. We already have a super contest scheduled for next week and then another great one starting in mid July…. and another one already scheduled after that too. So if you are interested in running a contest with us, you better let us know soon because we are already booked up until August.

As for the training posts, we still do have a couple posts to finish and we have a keyword post to finish as well. We are then going to put those posts into a PDF ebook and make it available to everyone on the mailing list.

We promise that the quality of content will continue to be as good (if not better) as you have been used to over the past 10 weeks and we even have a sweet tool we are creating for you (and its free) to help you with one of the research strategies we have taught.

We would love to hear your feedback on the whole COWpetition, including the posts, strategies, the blogs, what you loved, what you hated (you better have not hated anything ) and so on. Please comment below and let us know.

Last of all, we just noticed this morning that a couple advertising spots have opened up and one of them is designated for a prize winner of a contest from a few days ago so if you want the other one, you better grab it now

Have a great and productive day!

Standing Above the Crowd to Find JV Partners – Day 17 COWPetition

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:19:41 +0000

A couple days ago we posted about the idea of “brown nosing” to get friends (JV Partners) and today we want to expand on that by providing you a real life scenario of what we truly meant by that and how we were able to gain some wicked exposure for our COWPetition blog GamerzReviewz.

First of all, we want to clarify something, we used the term “brown nosing” because of the shock value and we see it worked… which is cool but you will see today that the messages we sent people is not really that type of message BUT it depends on who is interpreting it. The BIGGEST thing we want to emphasize here however is the point that you do NOT want to be fake… it comes down to being respectful. What we mean is being fake is transparent and will eventually come back to bite you, however being respectful and sticking to facts is solid and will not turn around to bite you.

An example of this is an argument we got into with a friend at a wedding. We married sisters and my friend accused us of being fake because our wives ornery grandfather likes us much more then him. The basis of his argument was that we always acted pleasant and happy to see him even though he was often not a pleasant person to be around and is very set in his ways. My friend looked at this as being fake because he feels he should not have to act different for anyone and if he does not like someone then it is how he is going to act.

The way we looked at it however was…

1. We love our wife and this is her grandfather and she loves him very much
2. He is 89 years old and is very set in his ways
3. Who benefits from being rude and confrontational with him?

You see we look at it as to how can we make this a WIN/WIN and by digging our heels in the ground and being confrontational with him is only a win for one person (our selfish pride) but is a lose for everyone else. So instead, by us having to give a little more by being patient and overlooking certain things we make our wife happy which makes us much more happy

Now we need to stress one point, this respect only goes so far. Being respectful does not entail letting people walk all over you and take advantage of you. We get into debates with him and he knows where we stand on things however we are respectful to him.

Now lets carry this over into business examples. When you are looking at making WIN/WIN partnerships with people, ask yourself how can you get the most benefit out of this partnership. You need to look past appeasing your inner selfish pride and look at what is good for your business not just right now but for the long term as well. So often we get caught up in the here and now and fail to see how this will affect us in the future.

Our belief (and we have proven this in our own business) is that by going the extra mile for someone now helps to ensure a solid relationship in the future. For example with a new site that has little traffic and search engine influence, to approach someone and ask for a link trade or to be mentioned on their blog is not really a fair trade. This person has worked hard to be able to get to where they are and in our opinion to simply expect them to link to you or mention you because you link back is actually a little disrespectful in our opinion… especially if the person has never heard of you before.

Now one can argue that it is more effective to try and build a relationship first with the person and we 100% agree with this to a point. Examples are being solid contributors to their blog, providing constructive feedback about their products and things like that. The challenge we had here however was that we only had 30 days with this COWpetition to get as much exposure as we could with our blog and building relationships like that take time.

So what we did was first of all we made a list of all potential JV Partners that we could think of and we divided that list up into what type of partner they might be, which were….

1. Mailing List Partners: These are sites that have targeted mailing lists and might mail for us about our site
2. Content Partners: These are sites that might allow us to add content about our site
3. Banner Partners: These are sites that would put our banner on their site

Our main focus was to be on number one (mailing list) as that is the quickest way to get exposure.

Once we had our list we then had to research the most effective way to contact them. Some where friends but most were complete strangers. Contacting people we already had relationships with was easy, these were people that we have made contact with over the years in the IM world that we knew had a presence in this market. You see we have sites and mailing lists in dozens of niches and so do our friends and it is wise to know this. By having a close network of friends and knowing what markets they are in is very helpful when you have an interest in a similar market. Since we already had a relationship with these people, it was much easier to just send an email, get on skype or call them up and ask for the favor.

Now it is important to understand that we also made it clear that it was not just a one sided approach and we made it very clear as to how we would make it worth their while… the cool thing is since we already had proven our value as a friend to them, most simply did it as a friend.

Now, contacting the strangers on the other hand is the hard part. As stated above, we have had no time to build a trustworthy relationships with these people and so we needed to be able to ensure that our request stood above the crowd as something that was truly worth their consideration and this is were some might look at it is “brown nosing”.

The first step was to ensure we had the best possible contact method for them. Most was email but some had phone numbers available and we also looked for the name. Using the persons name in the communication is very important. Once we had the contact info we needed to create a personalized communication for each one. A huge mistake a lot of people make is by using just one template and simply replacing the name and url of the site… this is what is called being fake. Instead you need to look at their situation and see how it is you can add value to what they already have. If someone has a forum that already has loads of backlinks and traffic, by offering a link back to them is pretty much useless but perhaps offering to make a major mention of them as a sponsor with a link in a paid press release that you are sending out might be more enticing. For others we noticed that they had a good size list but were not showing up for certain main terms in the search engines and so we figured we could offer some targeted link building on certain terms. We looked at each site and tried to figure out the best value we could offer.

Next we needed to make sure we communicated in a professional way. By sending emails from a gmail or hotmail account is usually not a great idea for first impressions, so we made sure to create personalized email accounts using the domain of the blog. Next we made a basic template that only covered certain things, such as describing who we were. It is important that you try as best as possible to sound professional, so if you have a company name, then use that in the email.

Next we created very personalized messages for each site, that focused on what we saw of value in them and how we were willing to go above and beyond to work with them to make this a true win / win.

Here is an example outline that is very similar to what we actually used. We modified it slightly and PLEASE do NOT just copy and replace this message below, make sure you make your own custom messages and use your own voice with own introduction, make your message stand out from the crowd.

Start of Email –>

Dear (Insert Name Here),

My name is (Your Name Here) and I am the Marketing Manager of (Company Name Here), and we are looking for some powerful partners to align with in a new endeavor we are partaking and you immediately came to mind. (Their Name here), I have known of your site (url here) for a while and I absolutely love how (enter something you really like about their site or service and do NOT be fake, this is were you build them up).

(This section is now where you explain what you are doing, we mentioned that we are building a Video Game Review blog that was part of a contest on a popular blog, that we were giving away a free gaming console and what we had planned for marketing with the site, we also gave them the URL and explained all the plans for the blog.)

We have a host of diverse and experienced skill sets that are going to make this endeavor a success, including:
(In point form mention things you could offer. Even if you are the only one doing this or if you have a few out-sourcers then mention what you have to offer in services, you do not need to mention you are doing everything yourself but do not lie and say you have an office full of staff if you do not and make sure to make it sound as professional as possible. For us since we have in house staff we used that to our advantage and mention all that we had to offer )

(This section is to now explain how we envisioned them working with us. We explained what we thought was great about what they could bring to the table, we let them know we respected what they have done so far and how we would be willing to go above and beyond to work with them and we explained in detail exactly what we would be willing to do in return. You need to made it clear what you will do for them, set it up to make it a no brainer for them. It is important that you do NOT expect them to see the benefit of a partnership right away, even though you do, you need convince them of it by going above and beyond.)

(This section is to now close the conversation and add urgency to it. It was important for us to not put excessive pressure on them but they needed to know that there was a time frame involved here. For us this was very short and so we needed to be a little more aggressive but if you do not have an immediate short term then save this for a follow up message.)

Thanks (Enter Their Name Here), for taking the time to consider our proposal. My team and I are standing by to make this a very worthwhile partnership. I am also open to any ideas you might have in regards to this proposal.

I look forward to working with you,

Kindest Regards,

Name Here
Your Company Name and Position
Phone Number
Email Address

<– End of example email

IMPORTANT –> Do not contact any potential partners until you have something worthwhile to show them. Make sure your blog or service is ready to go, nothing says “Delete Me” more then a partner request from someone who only has a vague idea about something. If it is just a plan then make sure you have a written out plan with details you could send them… so often we have been asked to talk to someone who sounds like it might be a good idea only to find out they have no idea, just a hunch. Make sure you have something concrete for the potential partner to grab onto.

Well this is the end of another super long post

Hope you enjoyed it and tomorrows post is going to be much shorter and we are going to talk about following up with potential partners after the initial message is sent.

COW Questions of the Week – What Do You Digg Your Heels in On?

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:10:14 +0000

We were standing in line at Home Depot and since the line was so long, we decided to use one of the automated self checkouts. Well everything went great until the reciept did not print out and upon further investigating, we saw that the reciept was jammed.

So we asked the cashier next to us if she could call for some assisstance.

About 5 minutes later the cashier politely said to a lady that was next in her line up, that she would just be a moment because she needed to help us out. The lady (who we would guess was around 60) got very upset and demanded that she be served now and the reason was that she felt the self checkouts were stealing peoples jobs and she had been waiting in line and wanted service now. To make matters worse a lady 3 people behind her piped up and said that she agreed with her because being a cashier got her through university.

The cashiers face turned as red as a barn and she did not know what to do, so we told her to go and help the lady. The cashier then said that no one person has been let go because of the auto checkout but the lady started raising her voice at her saying it was only a matter of time. Then the lady behind her piped up again and together they were being a couple miserable old hens.

Well we could not keep our mouth shut… and we asked the lady who started the issue if she ever used her bank card to withdraw money from an ATM? She looked at us a little alarmed and before she could reply we simply said because she was a hypocrite if she did. Her face got flush and she turned around and did not say another word… neither did the other lady that piped up. It was a very strange situation all in all and we just could not believe what a scene that both these ladies made over such an issue.

There always has been and there always will be things that will cause some one to “lose a job”… but does that mean as technology improves we will have more and more unemploment? No of course not… if that was the case then our unemplyment rate would be at an all time high and the fact is that it is not. We realize that the USA is in a recession right now but the unemplyment rate is no where near the level it was in the 70′s and 80′s (if you do not believe me then check it for yourself at http://www.ofm.wa.gov/trends/tables/fig105.asp).

So then if the issue the lady had was not based off any cold hard facts… what was it based off of?

There is a great lesson to be learnt here that can, in our opinion, help with your online business. What is that lesson? Well we want to see if you can figure it out first… then we will share our opinion. So if you have a moment please answer the following two questions….

Question 1. What in your opinion was the reason this lady got so mad that she was willing to make an idiot of herself in front of others to defend a point that was in actual fact… pointless?

Question 2. In what ways do you think we do this very same thing in our own business?

We will follow up this post with our opinion tomorrow, we look forward to reading your moos on this.

And Even More Contests…

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 23 May 2008 22:58:55 +0000

We are a little behind on a few things and we are still in the office, even though it is 6:52pm on a Friday night

Anyway, we are working on todays “detailed” post of the cowpetition but it is going to be a few hours yet .. actually more like tomorrow morning… and so for all of you that are in the contest frame of mind, we thought we would share a couple other cool contests that are going on in the blogosphere.

#1 – Greatest Domaining Blogging Contest Ever: Over at the Daily Domain Name Blog they have put together 62 genuine prizes for one pretty cool contest… and they are all good prizes!

#2 – Twitter Writing Contest: This one is over tonight we believe so you need to hurry. It is by Brian Clark over at Copyblogger (a really cool guy we recently got to talk to) and he is having a really cool little contest that involves making a twitter post.

#3 – Mac Book Air and Cash: This is brought to you by Mike Huang (who is sadly more a fan of Garry then Cow… can you say bad Mike… bad, bad Mike) over at Bloggin-ads.com.

Do your self a favor and check out these awesome blogs and let us know if you win.

Do You Know of Any Other Contests Going On? If so then comment about them below.

PS –> I just got confirmation from a well known guy in the MMO industry that is donating a $2000 prize to our little “COWpetition” but we cant say what it is just yet

Dividing Up the Work – Day 4 of Cowpetition

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:43:08 +0000

Now that we have brainstormed our list of tasks, we need to break them down and put them on a timeline.

Obviously with this cowpetition, we have an unexpected and aggressive time line that needs to fit into or other tasks that can not be ignored. Not having a set deadline however, is not an excuse to not make one. If you want professional results, you need to treat this entire process as a professional. That means prioritizing, planning, setting goals and deadlines!

By not setting deadlines, you run the risk of…

Scope Creep: Constantly adding new features, strategies and more. This is killer on time frames and budgets and needs to be controlled. You must look at items that are not immediate needs as “maybes” and once all the important things are done and the blog is published and promoted, you can go back and look at implementing these strategies.

Procrastination: Give us an excuse to put it off until tomorrow and we will always put it off until tomorrow. Procrastination is a killer on time management and return on investment and you need to always keep this in check and setting a strict time frame can help. This takes self discipline, especially if the only one you answer to is yourself. This is where finding a “business accountability” partner or group is powerful. Two or more like minded individuals meet and review what’s going on, provide each other with third party feedback and review each others goals and help to enforce accountability. If you suffer with procrastination, then stop here and really think about who you can get to work with you on helping you.

Analysis Paralysis: With out a deadline you will find yourself spending hours upon hours on tasks that are an absolute waste of time and money. An example is trying to get a plugin to work with your blog that offers nothing but some fun functionality. Frustration and determination kick in and you can get so focused on getting this to work you lose all perspective on time. Before you know it, the day is gone and all you have to show for it is a cool plugin that still does not work. Set a deadline and use a timer and make sure you are spending time working on tasks that make you mooney!

How to Set a Deadline:

Well the obvious answer is –> when you need it done by

How about for those that do not have a specific time requirement?

This is when you look at your goals and figure how this fits into with them. If you are just starting out and your first goal was to have your expenses covered in 60 days, then you need to consider the time to build and promote the blog. Then the time it takes for traffic to build up and revenue to start generating.

As a rule of thumb we believe it is wise to not plan any revenue at all to be generated less then 30 days from the completion of the blog. We are NOT saying it is not possible and in fact if you do everything correct, it will happen. What we are saying is for the initial goal it is best to set yourself up so the odds are more in your favor.

This is when we love to go back to the dry erase board. So with the cowpetition, we put the date that is 30 days from the start of the cowpetition at the far right side of the board.

Next we divide the board into resource sections. Here is a screen shot of our dry erase board…

(A) 4 sections for this project. Researcher, Content Creator, Designer / Programmer, Promotion

(B) The deadline is set for the date the site must be ready for promotion, which is Friday May 23rd. The goal for this deadline was for the main functionality and initial content to be implemented. The agreed upon “Link Bait” to be implemented and a name capture system but into place.

(C) The End Deadline is reviewed and we double check that we feel there is enough time to accomplish the needed tasks

(D) Each task is divided among the sections and in order or priority, so that jobs that are needed to be done first are done first. For example, the initial research for the targetted niche needs to be decide upon, then initial terms to focus on for content and then the domain name and so on.

It would not be wise to start content before you even know what you are needing

Here is the List of Our Initial Urgent Tasks and Basic Conversation About Them…

1. What Niche: Decide on specific niche in the “Video Gaming” market to target: Obviously the “video game” market is very broad and there are a lot of options to pursue. We need to do initial research to focus in on a niche that we can own. The niche must have…

Decent traffic –> This should be pretty obvious (We will use Google trends her and compare again terms we know the traffic for)
Low Competition –>not be overwhelmed with competition and a revenue potential. (Use Google filter allintitle:”keyword phrase” )
Revenue Potential –> Must see obvious ways that the niche can be monetized, affilaite products, ad sales and so on.

2. Content: Once we have the targetted niche, we need to get the Initial content decided on using LSI principal. The challenge with this content is there is not enough time to truly know if they are going to be profitable however we are limited on time and need to select words to get started with right away. to accomplish this most effectively we…

Brainstormed topics we wanted to write about
Went to the top forums to see what the hot conversations were
Checked out stores to see what hot sellers were

We do more keyword research later, that focuses more on “Money” keywords, but this takes a little time and we need some initial content for this cowpetition right away.

3. Domain: There are two ways to look at this, we could get a domain that is keyword rich or get a domain that is “brandable”. To do this we…

Generate a list of keywords based on what was found from task 2 using the strategy laid out at http://www.johncow.com/keyword-research-show-me-the-money-words-that-is/
Take those keywords and enter them into TrafficTravis (which I will be going into more detail on in tomorrows post)
Take the results of Traffic Travis and use the Godaddy bulk register to find unregistered and keyword rich domains. (We will show this trick tomorrow as well)
Filter through to see if there is anything that fits. If not, then look for variations that can be brandable.

HERE IT IS EVERYONE –> For those asking when we were going to reveal the domain… this is what we decided on http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/, you can check out the almost finished (goal is to be done tomorrow so don’t pick anything apart yet) blog at Gamerz Reviewz

We decided on this domain because it captured the niche we wanted, is easy to remember and brandable.

4. Install: Blog Installed with selected Theme and Plugin: This obviously had to wait until we had the domain selected

5. Design and Graphics: Now that we have domain, we need to agree on the mood of the blog and what message to tell people as soon as they arrived on the blog. We needed to pick colors and graphics that matched what we felt our target audience would like.

6. “Link Bait” Content Ideas: Needed to brain storm content ideas to get lots of initial linking done and subscribers to out list and have it needs to be natural links and authentic subscribers. The “Link bait” must be something that people would want to share with others and help drive traffic to with sites like Stumbleupon and Digg. The options we looked at were…

Controversial article
Cool video
Free give away (ebooks, software etc)
Contest

For this niche and the time frame we had to come up with the actual content, we needed an idea that was easy to implement and very powerful. The winning idea was to offer what people in this niche need or want… and that was a new gaming system.

7. JV Partners: List of sites to contact for joint ventures: We now need to brain storm and research all the sites and contacts we have that might be willing to be a sponsor for this contest or mail their list about the contest. We need to collect emails and phone numbers and we also needed to brain storm an offer, that would be a “major win” for the sponsor.

IMPORTANT –> Do NOT shy away from this step, it is what took us from working for others, to working for ourselves. Build relationships with others and offer them incredible value for their effort. For example, we would not email someone and ask for sponsorship with out making it very much worthwhile on thier end. For our example, we emailed with recommended sponsorship amounts and what they would get in return. We offered promotion on our site but also offered outside promotion such as article submissions. The different levels of sponsorships came with different levels of available promotions.

8. Account Creation: We need to create the basic accounts to be used with this site. Each account must be able to be sold as a package with the blog (since that is our goal). The accounts we needed created were…

Gmail
Feedburner
Aweber
Facebook
Digg
Twitter

There will be more accounts created later but these were the ones we wanted created initially.

9. Legal Docs: Need to be sure we have all are ducks in a row with privacy, terms of use, disclaimers and all that good stuff.

Each of these tasks were divided up with needed time frames to meet our initial deadline. So far, we are on target

In tomorrows post we are going to step you through our Keyword Training (to help finish off the other series we were working on), to show you exactly how we use Traffic Travis. We will also be going into more detail about how we contacted potential sponsors and our results so far with them. Depending on how long that lesson is we may or may not start getting into…

Niche specific content for blog and promotions research (will explain difference from initial needed content tomorrow) using LSI principals
What plugins we implemented and why
Social site accounts set up
Videos planned for promotions
Start viral marketing engine
Maintenance plan

Hope you liked this walk through… What’s your feedback so far?

Narrowing Your Focus – Day 3 of Cowpetition

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:35:28 +0000

If you have been involved in making money online for more than a couple of years, you will remember that as recent as 2 years ago all that was needed for market research was to find a program that could generate mass amounts of keywords for you. You really did not care too much about anything except getting the biggest list possible.

Today, that is a risky and ineffective way to go. The search engines are getting smarter all the time and their goal is to serve their customers the absolute best search results they can. In order to achieve this, they have hired incredibly talented people to help them design complex algorithms that allow them to automatically filter out good sites from bad sites.

One of the more recent technologies that have been getting a lot of attention is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). What this technology (algorithm) does is it tries to imitate the thinking process of a human visitor to do its best to determine if the results of their query are relevant to what the person would be searching for. So when looking at a web page, it would look at the content from a perspective of how a human conversation would take place.

The easiest way to understand it is to think of an example. If you are sitting in your buddy’s garage looking at his new car, do you just say:

“Wow, I love red cars. That is a nice red car; I would love to go for a ride in your red car. How much did your red car cost?”

No! Of course not, because that is not natural. Instead the conversation would probably go more like:

“Wow, I love the color red on vehicles. That is a really nice set of wheels; I would love to go for a ride. How much did your car cost?

See how the keyword “red cars” is not even used? That is because most conversations are not so direct or specific. The human language relies on a lot of assumptions and generalities. When you read the second phrase, you understand that there is a red car but you are not beat over the head with the keyword phrase itself.

Now if that was a 500 word article, I am sure you could actually fit the word “red cars” in there, but as the above example shows, you would use other terms as well. Those other terms are terms that are commonly used with the primary term or topic of the conversation, which means they are related.

Another example would be a forum conversation. If you spend any time in forums you will know that when a topic is started, it is not uncommon for it to head in an entirely different (although related) direction. So for example, a topic on “Scuba Diving Goggles” may be started and after a couple posts some one might comment about how they got this great set of diving goggles at a store when they were diving in Fiji. Another person would then refer to that and talk about an experience they had scuba diving in Fiji and some other locations they have visited. Another person might then relate to another location the previous person referenced and how they had a great scuba diving instructor there who recommended a certain type of goggles.

Now, the above example is just that, an example, but this is very much the same as how human conversation is. The mistake many niche bloggers make is they get content that is too focused on a specific keyword and only that keyword. What ends up happening is the content is useless from an end-user standpoint. This strategy has had its time and place, but in the last year alone, many improvements have occurred (especially in Google with LSI) and this strategy is becoming less and less effective.

Content needs to be focused on themes and created like a conversation. You need to not focus in on one single word, but instead focus on the theme for the topic and what conversations occur around that theme. With the use of LSI, Google is better able to determine the relevance of a website by quickly comparing its content to that of existing websites that Google considers trustworthy. So if your web page does not contain the verbiage that is frequently associated with the subject matter of related sites, then the new website will not be considered to be part of that theme or market, which is not good from a long term rankings perspective.

So when you start your market research you need to keep this in mind. We are not looking for those magic individual keywords, we are not doing keyword research but we are doing is Market Research. This will become very clear as we move on.

Where to Start? How About Selecting a Niche?

As the saying goes, the first step is always the hardest. This is very true for individuals starting out for the first time with market research. We can hear the cries now:

“Where Do We Begin?”

The question you first need to ask is what type of business are you creating?

Do you want to create a blog that is something you will personally author and become a known name for?
Do you want to create lots of small niche specific affiliate focused blogs?
Do you want an online store front for your current off line business?
Are you creating blogs to turn around and sell?
And the list goes on and on

You see, if you can not answer the question of “what you want to do”, then you really can not move to the next step effectively.

Question for You –> What type of business are you creating?

John Cow Answer –> For this contest we are creating a blog that we want to turn around and sell in 30 days. This means we want a market that has a potential for lots of traffic, has lots of passionate people, is already a proven market (we do not have time to test new markets), we know where to find contacts (because we know the market) and is something we are familiar with so we can ensure that the content is good for the time frame we have.

IMPORTANT –> Do not worry about boxing your self in to one type of business. For example, you might want to start a blog on a specific market that you want to be personally known as an authority for. This does not mean you can not later create small niche sites that promote affiliate products, but what it does mean is that can not be your main focus right now. You want to distinguish the two because it influences the decisions in the next step.

We Know the Business… Now What?

As you can see from our breakdown of reasoning, there are limitations to the type of market we can select because of the criteria for our business. We would not want to pick an emerging health niche that we have no interest in or knowledge about because the research and testing would be too time consuming. For us this next step was to brain storm all the markets we…

Already know there are markets in
We have knowledge about
We know how to find contacts in
We see similar “market related” sites selling at sitepoint.

The last 2 points are the most important in our opinion. First of all by us understanding the market, we know exactly where the people are that are influencial in this industry. Not that this can not be researched and found but we are very limited on time with this challenge and to create the absolutely best results we need to purely stick to what works… very little room for exploratory research. The second point was critical because we want to know that these types of sites are actually selling… which really is the end result we are after.

So we brainstormed all the possible markets and 4 immediately came up…

Video Gaming
Mountain Biking
Karate / MMA
Online Business

These are four markets we are knowledgeable in and are some what passionate about. So we now broke down this list and gave points to the specific ones that best met our criteria and we came up with the selection being “Video Gaming”

This market has lots of passionate people, we are knowledgeable about, know where contacts are easily found and appears to have related sites selling (or so it appears).

STOP –> You may have chosen to start with building a different business model such as niche specific blogs that are purely for promoting affiliate products and generating Adsense revenue. If that is you then you need to check out the “Market Research” series that we started a couple weeks back.

So Now We Have Our Market — What’s Next?

Now we need to map out our plan and time frame. We know the goal, we talked about that in the previous lesson, but now we need to map out how we are going to reach that goal in the needed time frame.

This is where we absolutely LOVE dry erase boards. Since starting full time online we have never been without a dry erase board and the reason is they are perfect for standing up and putting in front of you what you need to accomplish.

Obviously you do not need to go out and buy one… but it is what we use and so we are telling you about it

The first step is to list all the tasks that need to have done and we designate them into short term (Urgent Need), long term (Non Urgent but Important) and “Maybe” tasks:

Urgent Tasks: (Need to be done first above everything else)

Decide on specific niche in the “Video Gaming” market to target
Initial content decided on using LSI principals
Domain set up with the blog installed
Design and graphics started
“Link Bait” Content ideas agreed upon
List of sites to contact for joint ventures
Plugins installed and set up
Gmail account created
Feedburner and aweber account set up
Get legal documents in place (privacy and so on)

Non Urgent but Important Tasks:

Niche specific content for blog and promotions research (will explain difference from initial needed content tomorrow) using LSI principals
Social site accounts set up
Videos planned for promotions
Start Contacting potential JV partners
Start viral marketing engine
Maintenance plan

Maybe Tasks (these are ideas that came up that could potentially be scope creep and so we will look at as time allows). We are not posting any of these here, but if we have time to implement them we will share them. Some are ideas we have not seen tried before and since this is public to all.. sorry not sharing them yet.

The above is just a general summary of the tasks that are needed to accomplish our goal, yours very well may be the same. One thing to note is that because our end goal is to sell this, we have to keep this in mind for all services and accounts we create, they will need to be made available with the purchase.

Task For You –> Create a list of all the tasks you know need to get done and put them into three categories

Urgent & Important
Non Urgent and Important
Maybe

Tomorrow we will walk you through each of the above tasks that we listed and how they were broken down and assigned.

Start of Cow Rant –> Garry Conn quit crying that we have not mentioned our niche yet… why have you not publicly mentioned yours yet? We have everything out in the public for everyone to see. Do you really think we give a care what market you are picking, that would only slow us down. Instead of complaining, do yourself a favor and actually read the training we are providing and maybe you can actually stand a chance…. awww who are we kidding, you are going to get killed here. <– End of Cow Rant

As always, please provide feedback on this post. We are exposing all to you readers here and we hope you appreciate it because we sure appreciate you all!

The Big Picture – Day 2 of Cowpetition

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:41:01 +0000

“Give a person a fish; you have fed them for today. Teach a person to fish; and you have fed them for a lifetime.”

Our desire is to have you succeed by following our system. That means that we teach you exactly what you have to do and show you the tools we use to get the job done. What we cannot and will not do however, is the work for you. Creating a successful business online is no different than creating a traditional brick and mortar business… It takes perseverance, money, time and most of all, hard work and commitment from you.

What we are going to show you over the next few weeks is not about “Get Rich Quick” schemes. Instead, we stand strong to the concept that you do it right from the beginning and your rewards will be for the long term. You see, most get rich quick systems are based off of ways to “Cheat” the system. We on the other hand, believe in working with the system to achieve incredible results.

To begin, ask yourself a few questions to better understand the reasons for running a business online:

#1 Why Are You Doing This?

Before you can start into any part of your new business, you need to ask yourself this one extremely important question:

Why are YOU doing this?

You need to stop right now from wanting to rush into just building a blog. Take a step back for a moment to try and understand the big picture. You have probably heard the saying:

“You can not see the forest for the trees.”

What that means is sometimes you can get so caught up in little details that you miss out on the entire big picture. If you want to truly know where you are going then the best bet is to step back, look at the entire picture and then map out what you want. So asking yourself “Why you are doing this” is one of the first steps in being able to truly understand where it is you want to go.

Some examples of “Why” might be:

to help a current business expand
to make some extra cash on the side
to be able to quit your job and work for yourself
just for fun
you fill in the blank here

Question to You –> Now it is your turn. What is the number one reason you are doing this?

JohnCow’s Why –> For us the answer to this question is to Prove Market Authority. We want to prove to our readers that we know what we are talking about, it is not about winning, it is about social proof. After 30 days we want the posts and the blog that we built to speak for themselves.

#2. What do You want to Accomplish? What is Your Goal?

You may think this is the same as the first question, but it really is not. Why you are doing something is not the same as what you want to accomplish by doing it. This question takes the first one to a deeper level because it makes you look at it as more than a far off dream but as an attainable goal.

If your answer is “to make some extra cash”, then you probably have a set amount of cash you want to make. Perhaps it is to help pay off a debt or to afford a new vehicle. Whatever the reason, now is the time to figure that out.

Do not shrug this off! It is so incredibly important and so often overlooked. We guarantee you the people that are very successful online all have answered this question. This comes down to work ethic, you need to take the time to build your solid foundation, and then once that is established, everything else will fall into place.

So How Do You Set a Goal?

Let’s say you make a $40,000 a year salary and want to be able to quit that job to work full time online. The first thing you will need to do then is understand exactly how much you need to live on and then double that (this is the formula we used when we started).

So for our example if you make $40,000 but feel you could live on $35,000 then that would be $70,000. Now that you have a goal of $70,000 as a yearly income, the reason you double it is because you will have to pay taxes, health insurance, employees (even if just outsourcing) and so on. 50% is generous but the last thing you want to do here is short change yourself.

Next you need to figure out exactly how much money that is per day. So take $70,000 and divide it by 365 which equals approximately $192 a day.

So now you need to ask yourself, how are you going to do that? Break that value down to smaller goals. So for example, what it might look like for you is:

$100 – Affiliate income
$70 – Adsense / Yahoo Pub / Chitika / Pepperjam
$30 – Advertising on blog

(this is just an example)

Now it is time to pick a time frame that you are going to achieve that goal. You want to be aggressive here, but you also need to be realistic. If you have never built a blog in your life and to say you are going to achieve that goal in 30 days, it is not going to happen.

A realistic example might be to create a time frame such as:

1 Months – Earning enough to pay for itself
3 Months – Earning $1000 per month
6 Months – Earning $3000 per month
1 Year – Earning $5800 per month (Your 1-Year goal)

Once you have your first goal accomplished, then focus on your second and third. Once that final goal is reached make another one and this time go bigger!

Make sure you do not create for yourself an unrealistic goal either! We agree full and well with the concept of aiming high, but one of the biggest reasons many people get discouraged with their progress is they start too high. If you are just starting out, set a goal to what you can live on and then once you achieve that you can then focus more time by being able to do this full-time and you can start to reach for the BIG goals.

If you already have a goal, then congratulations! You are already ahead of the majority.

Something important to note is that you need to stick to your plan and not focus on what every other marketer is telling you. Once you have a plan in place and start to see what is working for you, then simply repeat the process. If a new product or strategy comes out and looks good then figure out how to implement it into your current strategy. If it does not fit then leave it alone! If it does fit and makes something easier to do then great! Keep it and keep moving forward!

This is so often the spot that people get hung up on. They have a plan but then Mr. Marketer comes along and says to do it this way instead, so we stop what we are doing and start over again, or even worse, do nothing while we analyze the situation and waste time and money.

Get back to the basics, start with a goal and create yourself a firm foundation first!

Once you have this goal, you will want to print it out and place it somewhere prominent that you will be able to see everyday that you are at your work station. Every morning before you get started, focus on that goal and what you are going to do today to get close to achieving it.

Question to You –> What is your 1month, 3 month, 6 month and 1 year Goal?

John Cow’s Goal –> For us the answer to this question is focused only on a short term goal that in 30 days (because of the cowpetition time line) to have created a blog that when put on the market at sitepoint.com is sold as a complete “Business” solution for the buyer.

#3. Make a Commitment

Now for the hard part. We talked about this in the previous lesson but in our opinion it needs to be repeated again. Writing out why you are doing this and what you want to accomplish is easy. Anyone can take a few minutes and write down a bunch of simple words. What is going to make the difference from making these just a bunch of words to making them an actual goal is that you need to make a commitment to what you wrote down.

As we have said a couple times before, this is going to take hard work on your part and that means that you are going to need to commit time to this every day.

How much time?

That depends on how fast you want to succeed, but we recommend that you spend at least 2 hours a day on this for at least the next 6 months if you want to see any measurable results. So in order to do that you are going to have to clear your schedule to allow for 2 hours a day to be spent on this.

That might mean that you have to drop a favorite pastime for awhile or stop watching a favorite television show. Maybe it means that you will have to stay up a little later every night. Whatever it is, you need to decide now and make a commitment that you are going to dedicate that time to growing your business.

The best way to do this is to map out your week ahead of time. This is one of the reasons we love the Franklin Covey day planner systems, because they are based around the principal of putting first things first. That means you need to look at your schedule and plan ahead of time when you are going to accomplish your important tasks.

By looking at your week, you will start to see a lot of opportunities that you could be doing something more productive. Once you identify your areas, you can then plan those times for working on your business.

Get a timer!

One of the absolute best things we have ever got ourselves to help improve our time management was an electronic egg timer from Wal-Mart. What you can do is if you know you can work one hour in the morning before work and one hour in the evening when you are usually watching TV, then you set the timer for 1 hour and put it in front of you. Once you press start on the timer then all distractions are off. That means you shut your door, unplug the phone, put in ear plugs (or listen to music if it helps) and do not randomly surf the web! Instead, commit yourself to being effective for that time. If you are having a hard time finding time in your schedule for these 2 hours, the last thing you want to do is waste them.

Important Reminder – “Work Ethic”

You see the internet and computers are supposed to make our lives simpler. We can process difficult calculations in milliseconds, create dynamic presentation, find information on just about anything by simply typing in a couple of search terms or talk with people around the world as if they were in the room next door. The problem with this is people often assume that since it makes all these things so much faster and simpler then it should be able to do the same for making money. There has got to be someone out there that has made some program that you simply push a little red button and “POOF” in mere seconds you are generating income.

The answer to that is a resounding.. NO!

Yes, there are great programs and material out there, but none of them, I mean absolutely none of them, are a big red button that allows you to sit back and do nothing.

We are sure you have heard of the 80/20 rule. This rule is incredibly universal in its scope because so many things fall into this. For the MMO market I would dare say it is more of a 90 /10 rule but for the sake of argument we will use the 80 / 20.

What this means is that 80% of those that buy any software or ebook, will never actually use it to its full potential. That means that 8 out of 10 people will either never even open the software or ebook or they open it up and read through it but give up because it looks like it takes too much work.

Then you have the 20%. This is the small group of people that actually are making a living online, they are the people that realize revenue is only generated through hard work, that no software or ebook is the end all be all of solutions and they actually read through everything and use the solutions how they were designed.

Our hope is by the end of this contest to have made you one of the 20% NOT one of the 80%!

Last but not least – Get Rest

Yes, it takes work, yes you are going to have to be a little busier than usual to get your business off the ground but the one thing your body and mind need is rest. We highly recommend that you take off one day a week from all work activity. That does not mean you cannot do work around the house or go fishing, but what it does mean is you completely remove yourself from your job.

This day should be dedicated to getting rest for your body (sleep in and or take an afternoon nap), do what you love (go for a walk, play with your kids outside or go fishing) and just enjoy yourself! More often than not, entrepreneurs who are starting out work themselves into a medication of some sort. They get no rest, no time to unwind and their body starts to react. Stress, depression, obesity are just some of the end results!

Life is your most precious gift, so enjoy it!

In tomorrows post we will walk through the market we selected, why we selected and how we organize our market research for immediate and long term needs.

Talk to you then!

PS – Yes we know by posting this stuff we are helping our cowpetition competitor… but thats fine… hopefully they will learn a few things they can teach to others as well

Oh and PLEASE Let us know your thoughts on this post please… our hoofs are all cramping up from typing so much!

WIN Over $2300 in Prizes with Our Cowpetition

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:31:28 +0000

Got some questions for you…

Want to learn first hand how to “truly” make money online?
Want to see from start to finish how we plan, research, build and market a blog to dominate and grow viral buzz?
Want to see a real life case study from start to finish?
Want a chance to WIN over $2300 almost $3000 in prizes?
Want it all for FREE?

>>>Click Here Now<<< to visit our “Official” Cowpetition page and learn exactly how you can enter to Win!!!

Learn How to Kill Your Competition – A Case Study of How We Beat up Garry Conn

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:27:04 +0000

Over the past few days, there has been some smack thrown around by Garry Conn over at his blog, who was making some claims about the practices of this blog. Well, in the powerful and emotional and tear jerking words of the legendary leader and visionary Popey the Sailorman…

We’s taken all we’s could stand and we’s can’t stand no more!

Man, those words send shivers up our spine… so powerful… just so damn powerful… oh, ah.. uhm anyway back to what we were saying.

We thought it was time to put up or shut up and so we called out Garry to a competition, a competition that would have us each putting our practices into place and we would each build a blog focused on a specific non-IM niche. Then at the end of 30 days we would compare results… but this is where the problem lies.

What results to compare… revenue, traffic, selling the site and the price point… what???

You see, things are changing around here… for the better and the focus of this blog is to teach, inspire and well we would be lying if we did not say make money… but making money through true principals and practices and showing you how to truly do it for yourself. If you have been following along the Keyword lessons, you see that we are not sharing crap strategies here… this is stuff people pay money to get access to and took a lot of trial and error to figure out and best of all… makes us money

So, when someone was saying we are full of bull@#$t… it got our hackles up because we have worked damn hard to create what we have and we are willing to prove this anyway we can.

The Important Thing However is –> How can we do this so everyone benefits?

You see, Garry is a great guy, we actually have loads of respect for him and his blog. He does share good strategies and he is a smart guy… and it is not like we are out to destroy anyone… BUT we also do NOT want to be called things that WE are NOT.

So this competition needs to be first of all a benefit to the readers..YOU. We are going to show you everything, step by step that we do.. from start to finish so you can follow along and learn for yourself. After all, it is you the readers that make this blog what it is.

This is why we (Garry is too) are treating this very serious and making a real case study for you to follow along with and so the first thing you should do, right now, is enroll to be in the loop… this way you can be first in line to see every single communication on this and follow us step by step. To do that, simple enroll here…

We Also NEED Your Ideas and Input!

The next thing we need from you is ideas… we want your opinion and ideas as to how to best judge the competition. Keep in mind that the system needs to be proven. We are not at all worried about anyone cheating but the problem is the skeptics will start rumors and conspiracy theories and stuff like that.

So please, think about it and then post a comment below as to what you think would be the best way to handle this.

We have already stated that if the contest involves monetary value.. we are donating it all to World Vision… so keep that in mind when thinking up ideas.

XBOX360 Elite Contest Update

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:39:50 +0000

Hi kids, are you enjoying your weekend as much as we are? We sure hope so, but if not – you could do something to get rid of your boredom once and for all! Yes, we’re talking about the XBOX360 Elite + a copy of GTA4 contest, generously donated by Top Hosting Center. We’d just like to give a quick update on the stats and entries. If you have not joined in yet, there’s still ten days to enter to earn your free tickets for the raffle!

So far the post has had nearly 140 comments, about 50 blogpost entries from other bloggers, over 40 entries from people that signed up with the excellent Top Hosting Center affiliate program (any of you guys made any money with them yet?) tons of comments that were left on other blogs and a decent amount of reviews on stumbleupon about the contest. We don’t have an exact number of people that have subscribed to the RSS feed as not everyone chose the email option. Ah well, we’ll figure that out soon enough. We are doing our best to count all the tickets each and everyone of you have earned so far, and it looks like we’re gonna have a lot of fun counting all the tickets at the end of the month

Enter today if you haven’t done so, you don’t want to miss out on the easiest contest on the web! Here’s there original post to refresh your memory and check again how to win your tickets.

Win An XBOX360 Elite And A Copy Of GTA4!

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:29:33 +0000

Just when we thought Top Hosting Center couldn’t possible be any cooler, they messaged us on IM to let us know they’d like to sponsor one of our bigger contests. Obviously they didn’t have to tell us that twice! We’ve negotiated a little and you guys are probably going to be very happy with the outcome. We’re going to give one of our readers a brandnew XBOX360 Elite and a copy of the new Grand Theft Auto IV which is coming out at the end of the month, possibly the most anticipated game of the year!

We didn’t go for anything less than the best on this one, here’s what Microsoft says about the elite:

Xbox 360 Elite console: The console is equipped with an HDMI port, HDMI cable, a black wireless controller and black Xbox LIVE® headset. It also comes with three powerful core processors, 16:9 cinematic aspect ratio, anti-aliasing for smooth textures, full surround sound, and DVD playback with upscaling capabilities right out of the box.

As you can see, the console and all it’s accessories (wireless controller and headset) come in fashionable black. This version has the huge 120GB hard-drive and a HDMI cable to hook it up to your HD TV set for the ultimate Next Generation gaming experience! Besides the gaming, the whole media system is pretty good too. We use it a lot to stream moovies from our mac to the 360 via WiFi, so we can watch them on our big screen TV in the lounge, it’s ideal!

The winner will be picked via a lottery and you can choose how many tickets that you have in the draw! The more tickets that you have, the greater chance of winning! Here’s how to get your tickets:

250 tickets – Write a small blurb about this contest on your blog, 100 words minimum. Please make sure you linkback to our sponsor and to this post so your readers can find it.
250 tickets – Become an affiliate with THC for free. This is really a no-brainer as Top Hosting Center offers 50% commission for each sale you make for them! Within a few sales you can buy your own 360 if you don’t win this one! (We’ll check if you have one of their banners on your blog!)
25 tickets – Every comment, about this contest, you leave on another blog’s latest post will get you 25 tickets, as will leaving this link in a new forum thread somewhere, or when you mass message your myspace or facebook friends. Perhaps even use Twitter to let all your followers know
25 tickets – Subscribe to our RSS feed and THC’s blog feed.

That’s all kids. Contest will run until the 30th of this month, that’s when GTA4 is scheduled for release. We will throw all the tickets into a big hat and pick a lucky winner. Thanks again to the people at Top Hosting Center for being an awesome blog web host!

PS Look us up on XBOX Live with gamertag JohnCowdotCom if you want to get an ass whooping.

Competition Time – Win $500 Worth Of Coding

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:41:53 +0000

Its been a while since we had a cool contest and we do apologize for this. We know how much you guys like to win free stuff, so today we’re happy to announce we’ve got 2 great prizes up for grabs, generously sponsored by the code hackers at CSSRockstars. Basically what they do is take your design and turn it into something usable for the Net. We’re talking your very own WordPress theme, a Drupal or Joomla skin, perhaps a Pligg skin. If you have the design but you have no idea to turn it working code, this contest is right for you. If you don’t have a design, you can always hot of the boys from Weborithm to grab a spiffy blog design. And even if you don’t have something that needs to get coded, there’s always tons of people looking for a coder on the webmaster forums. We’re sure you’ll find someone that’s willing to buy that prize from you!

What does the service include?

An order for static coding includes cutting up the design, optimizing the images for size and presentation, coding the design into (x)HTML/CSS. Rollover, drop down menus and basic Javascript are all included in the price. An order for CMS or blog coding includes the above plus the final template or skin for the selected CMS.

So, here are the details for this little competition:

You can either write a small blurb about this contest (circa 200 words) on your blog. It could be about why you’d like to win this prize, or just something that mentions the contest. (e.g. JohnCow and CSSRockstars are giving away $500 worth of coding to anyone that just mentions them on their blog.

You could just add us and CSSRockstars to your blogroll. Please use “Making money online” and “CSS Coding” as anchor text if you choose this option.

That’s basically it. Oh, one more thing; We will pick 2 random winners on the 14th of March, which is in just 10 days, and announce them ONLY in our RSS feed. If you’ve won and don’t claim your prize that day, we will pick another winner. So make sure you sign up for our feed.